Cavaniola's Gourmet Cheese Shop Celebrates 20 Years

“Twenty years just came so fast,” Michael Cavaniola observed, standing in Cavaniola’s Gourmet Cheese Shop in Sag Harbor on a beautiful early afternoon in July. “These days, I think it’s unique for a small mom-and-pop even to be in business 20 years. But it’s actually getting better every year, as we continue to grow.”

The gourmet shop, which also sells a curated selection of charcuterie and specialty products like oils and vinegars, pastas and sauces, flatbreads and other delicacies, is indeed marking 20 years in business, and in that time has grown with the addition, two years after its founding, of Cavaniola’s Cellar, purveyor of niche and smaller-vineyard wines, in the adjacent, cozy Revolutionary War-era structure on Division Street.

Cavaniola’s Gourmet Kitchen, also onsite, opened in 2009 and offers “homemade comfort food” like soups, paninis, pastries, cakes and cookies.

And in 2016, Cavaniola’s Cheese and Gourmet, which adds craft beer to its offerings, opened at Amagansett Square. Cavaniola’s also offers cheese plates and gift baskets, as well as catering and event planning.

This summer sees yet another offering at Cavaniola’s Division Street headquarters: cheese vending machines accessible 24 hours a day. “In Europe,” Cavaniola said, “vending machines have everything in them, from tobacco to alcohol to cheeses and meats.”

The twin machines he recently installed do more than offer delicacies.

“It’s just like getting an education,” he said. “The name of the cheese, where it came from, the story of the cheese, wine to pair with the cheese. You have all that through the machine. It’s come a long way.”

Often, the sleek yachts in the nearby harbor “need to leave earlier than we’re open,” he said. “Or, people want late-night things. They can come here and get that.”

But the cheese shop remains the nucleus of the growing venture: On this weekday, foot traffic into and out of the welcoming space was constant, no one leaving without having sampled the day’s offerings.

“The whole idea behind this cheese shop, versus other cheese shops, is that our counters are very low, it’s very personal,” Cavaniola said. “The person comes in, we have the special, we have an education, we have a tasting — for every customer. I think that’s where the success came from. A lot of times, you walk in a store and there’s cheeses in a big case, someone’s behind it, and you just point and buy.”

Whereas, “I’ve been around cheese for 50 years of my life,” he said. “That’s a long time to be around anything, which gives me a lot of time not only to perfect what we sell, but I also know how to navigate what are the better cheeses, and not to sell the bad ones. Every single thing we sell, we get in, we age to perfection. We don’t just buy it, cut it and sell it, as other stores do. There is a peak for everyone, and that’s our job.”

That half-century of experience started in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Cavaniola’s father worked in a cheese shop.

“My dad kind of fell into it,” he recalled. “He was a young guy, had two children. He had various jobs, and one was at a cheese shop. He gravitated toward it, and a franchise became available called The Cheese Shop. He hopped on it. So I grew up in a cheese shop like this. Since I was 5 years old and through high school, I was working in a cheese shop during the holidays and summertime.”

But before opening his own shop, the son would become an architect, based in New York City and working for Michael Bloomberg.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “I wanted to get out of the city,” he said. “We had a house out here.

“I didn’t really want to do residential architecture,” he said, and a cheese shop was born.

“How bad could it be?” he recalled asking.

Not bad at all, when one is so clearly passionate about the product as Michael Cavaniola.

“We’re the last person to handle the product,” he said. “There’s animal husbandry, there’s taking care of the pastures and field and what goes into it so the cheese tastes a certain way from that specific herd, or type of cow that it’s come from, or goat or sheep.”

The terrain is important, “just like wine and terroir.”

“From there, you have to milk the cow twice a day, you have to turn it into curd, you have to put it into a mold, you have to age it, you have to do all kinds of things to it to do whatever you want to do. Then, we get it and do it final justice,” he said. “We don’t want to diss all of that hard work that went into it.”

The South Fork, he said, is ripe for a gourmet cheese shop, “because we have very well-traveled customers.”

“A lot of the customers are very excited to see the samples of cheeses that they saw in Europe and on their travels,” he said. “Plus, in this area, too, people have a thirst for knowledge and they want to learn more about everything. When they come in, even if they know something, they want to try two new things.

“I think if you’re going to come to a shop like ours, you’re going to be interested about the food you’re eating, where it comes from,” he added. “Nothing’s in our cheeses but rennet, salt and milk. That’s it. Of the hundreds of varieties of cheeses, they all are three basic ingredients. It’s a very pure food.”

As Cavaniola’s embarks on the next 20 years, its proprietor has ambitious plans that dovetail with this ethic. “I have a 140-acre farm upstate,” in the northern Catskills, Cavaniola said. “In a few years, I’m hoping to make my own cheeses. That would be the next step for me.”

He plans to start small — with one cow — until perfecting his craft.

“Then we can expand on it,” he said. “I’m thinking we’re going to do cows and sheep, very small quantity, probably just to sell in my shops. The idea is to slow down, not do another thing. But we want to have a whole homestead.”

The emphasis is on regenerative agriculture, he said, a holistic practice that restores soil and ecosystem vitality and is vastly healthier, for the Earth and all its inhabitants, than the factory-farm model. He is presently raising chickens and selling eggs, keeping beehives that produce honey, and growing vegetables.

“Slowly but surely, it’s getting up to speed,” he said. “Upstate, we also have a lot of maple trees, and we’re going to start doing maple syrup tapping, things like that.”

This, he said, was another impetus for the vending machines: “I want to put more time in upstate.”